Film addresses press mess

Friday

Jul 29, 2011 at 12:01 AMJul 29, 2011 at 7:37 PM

The title Page One: Inside 'The New York Times' is kind of misleading. For starters, its evocation of the golden age of print journalism, embodied by the play and movie The Front Page, makes the documentary sound like little more than a love song to a dying, but not yet buried, giant of the news business.

The title Page One: Inside 'The New York Times' is kind of misleading.

For starters, its evocation of the golden age of print journalism, embodied by the play and movie The Front Page, makes the documentary sound like little more than a love song to a dying, but not yet buried, giant of the news business.

Viewers almost expect it to open with shots of massive rolls of newsprint and conveyor belts serving up thousands of still-warm copies of that day's paper.

And it does.

But faster than you can say, "Sweetheart, get me a rewrite," filmmaker Andrew Rossi cuts away from such nostalgia-inducing bunk to cold, hard reality: TV news reports about one newspaper after another going under, victims of industrywide upheavals.

It's a good thing, too. The movie is a clear-eyed and engrossing look at an important subject.

Although the film's subtitle suggests that what we're about to see is primarily a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the Gray Lady (as the 160-year-old newspaper is known), Page One is much more.

To be sure, there are some inside-baseball scenes showing the editorial finagling and finessing that go into producing a story. Most people never see such efforts - or, frankly, care about them.

Still, the film isn't structured around such backroom negotiations.

It's built around David Carr, the Times' media columnist since 2002 and the former editor of the Washington City Paper.

To the extent that Page One has a narrator, it is Carr. He also doubles as the film's chief interview subject and tour guide. The movie is almost as much a profile of him as it is a portrait of his employer.

He quips that he still can't get over the feeling that Brian Stelter, a much younger and Web-savvier colleague, was "a robot assembled in the basement of The New York Times to come and destroy me."

Stelter, a blogger turned newspaper reporter who brought his blogging, tweeting and social-media skills to the Times - as have many others - also makes frequent appearances.

That broad vision of what constitutes journalism is what makes Page One matter.

Rossi is really interested in taking the biggest possible picture of the contemporary media landscape. That includes cable and broadcast television, the Internet, the impact of corporate ownership on newspapers, the rise of news aggregation sites and tablet computing.

Carr - and, by extension, Rossi - talks about all of that knowledgeably, entertainingly, broadly and passionately.